About this Book

Book Summary

Leavitt captures the longings of first love, the intense emotions of open adoption and the price of betrayal.

The longings of first love. The intense emotions of open adoption. And the price of betrayal.

Sara is sixteen and pregnant. Her once-devoted boyfriend seems to have disappeared, and her only option seems to be an open adoption with George and Eva, an older couple desperate for a child. But after the birth, it's clear Sara has a bond with the child that Eva can't seem to duplicate. And when Sara can't let go, Eva and George make a drastic decision with devastating consequences for all of them.

Chapter One

Sara's pains are coming ten minutes apart now. Every time one comes, she jolts herself against the side of the car, trying to disappear. Everything outside is whizzing past her from the car window because Jack, her father, is speeding, something she's never seen him do before. Sara grips the armrest, her knuckles white. She presses her back against the seat and digs her feet onto the floor, as if any moment she will fly from the car. Stop, she wants to say. Slow down. Stop. But she can't form the words, can't make her mouth work properly. Can't do anything except wait in terror for the next pain. Jack hunches over the wheel, beeping his horn though there isn't much traffic. His face is reflected in the rearview mirror, but he doesn't look at her. Instead, he can't seem to keep himself from looking at Abby, Sara's mother, who is sitting in the back with Sara. His face is unreadable. He keeps pushing back his hair, thick and brown, ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!

Abby makes a point of telling Sara what she calls "girls in trouble" stories about the awful times unmarried pregnant girls suffered in the 1950s. But who really are the "girls in trouble" in this book-and why?

At one point in the novel, Sara drops off all the gifts she's bought and saved for Anne and leaves them, "like abandoned babies" at a church doorstep. She says this is a new script, one she's writing for herself. Anne, too, uses writing to reshape and understand her life. Why are stories--the ones we tell each other and the ones we tell ourselves--so important in this book? How are some of these stories misinterpreted?

Why do you think Leavitt made Eva and George older parents? How does this figure into the themes ...

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Media Reviews

The strengths of Girls In Trouble lie in the questions it raises about complicated love, both family and romantic.

Glamour Magazine

Given the hot topic of this novel--open adoptions gone wrong, you'd expect a finger-pointing, too PC-tone. But Leavitt's surprising take will get your book group really talking.

Carole Goldberg - The Hartford Courant

A piercing spin on the theme of Romeo and Juliet. Leavitt makes this story refreshingly new. There are no villains here, just believable people trying to make the best of a difficult situation and - children and adults alike - growing up and growing wiser.

Smoky Mountain News - Jeff Minick

Leavitt displays her considerable talents for insight into the human heart. Clear, crystalline style...we are in the presence of a writer who values words.

BookSense 76 Selection

The ups and downs, joys and sorrows, and pitfalls of open adoption. The reader will empathize with each point of view. The characters are well developed and likable, and the story is compelling.

The Celebrity Cafe

Emotionally charged story about first love, resentment, self discovery, family and forgiveness. Deeply touching, honest and memorable.

The Washington Post - Carrie Brown

The success of Girls in Trouble is that it is both a page-turner and also a canny portrait of the trouble perfectly ordinary people can get into while trying to satisfy their perfectly ordinary needs for love and security and happiness. The pleasure of this novel, our enjoyment of it, comes from Leavitt's wisdom about the deep chasm of misfortune, her exploration of misfortune's steep slope and her recognition that climbing out of misfortune's pit, step by arduous step, requires a heroism that literature, with its capacity for rendering the elevated quality of ordinary experience, can portray so beautifully.

Publishers Weekly

Leavitt's uneven but earnest eighth novel examines the emotional price a bright Massachusetts teen pays when she chooses open adoption for a baby she gives birth to at 16.

Kirkus Reviews

A sadly familiar tale by Leavitt, though ably written in a straightforward style likely to appeal to teenagers and their parents as well.

Booklist - Gillian Engberg

In this wrenching exploration of parent-child relationships, Leavitt captures the tensions and rhythms of family attachments--the unspoken language, the simmering resentments and sweet hopes, the blinding, protective love that can both damage and heal.

Library Journal - Nanci Milone Hill

This is a wonderful story of family relationships, the choices we make, and whom we can count on. Recommended for all public libraries.

Sandra Benitez — author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and The Weight of All Things
A touching, heartfelt story showing that love can be a tangled journey

Gail Tsukiyama — author of Dreaming Water
The beauty of Caroline Leavitt's writing is in her flawless depiction of our human flaws. In Girls in Trouble, we ache for Sara, whose youthful decision will color the rest of her life--a poignant story of family and love, of what we lose, and sometimes, what we find again.

Elizabeth Strout — author of Amy and Isabelle
Heartfelt, filled with humanity, this story about the different forms of family bonds is a joy to read.

Kate Grenville — Orange Prize winning author of The Idea of Perfection
Kept me pinned to the page, swept along in an intense emotional journey with characters so real they seemed like friends. A beautifully written, moving and very wise book.

Laura Kasischke — author of The Life Before Her Eyes
Astonishing...there is a radiant joy that shines through it...a novel as rich and complex as it is meticulous.

Margot Livesey — author of Eva Moves the Furniture
What makes Caroline Leavitt's work so remarkable is her ability to conjure a whole range of disparate and difficult characters onto the page and to make us care deeply about each and all of them. Girls in Trouble is both utterly engrossing and richly satisfying.

Suzanne Beecher — Chapter-a-Day Bookclubs and Working Mother book columnist
Leavitt's heroine was pregnant at sixteen, and so was I....This book made me not only want to talk about what happened to me, but to claim it.

Abby Frucht — author of Polly's Ghost and Are You Mine?
Sara Rothman could be anybody's daughter...but her frank, warm, wise, gripping story, Girls in Trouble, could only be Caroline Leavitt's.

Reader Reviews

R. Jewel

I love a novel that teaches me something and Caroline Leavitt has let us inside a world most of us would never know about--open adoption. And I loved that Sara, the heroine who got pregnant as a teenager, was an honor's student from an upper middle... Read More

S.L. B.

I see that I am the first to review this book so let me be careful in my words....this was not the greatest book ever written but it was good,very very good! Was it realistic? Probaly more than you think!the characters were written very real not ... Read More

Beyond the Book

Teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. declined nearly one-third between
1991 and 2000.

A congressional report estimates that, if the teen birth rate had not
declined between 1991 and 2002, 460,000 additional children would be
living in poverty and 1.2 million more children would have been born to
teen mothers.

Shae-Lynn Penrose is former police officer with a closet full of miniskirts, a sharp tongue, and a tendency to deal with men by either beating them up or taking them to bed. But when the younger sister she thought was dead arrives on her doorstep, followed closely by a gun-wielding Russian gangster, a shady New York lawyer, and a desperate ...

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